250 Soakhamnuan stateless people don’t have the right to vote him into power. It depends on the leader, if he is nice, he will help everyone, if he is mean, he might help, but will ask for bribe money. The Thai people know how to read and write, but most stateless people don’t know the law or how to read or write in Thai, so if they are told that the police will get involved they are scared that they will be arrested. Luckily, my village’s leader was a good person and helped all of the stateless people in my village. When we were young, my mother just wanted us to stay at home. She was scared that we would get arrested because our home was near a police checkpoint, so we didn’t play outside in the neighborhood. Checkpoints in Thailand are in every city, before you pass the city limits. Thailand is small and has a lot of borders, so they don’t want to let illegal immigrants enter the country. Each checkpoint has police and army that are on duty 24/7. They check I.D.s, make sure there aren’t illegal drugs and monitor drunk driving. They check cars too, especially if they see that the car has a different license plate. Sometimes the checkpoint police also drove their motorbikes or cars around our community and stopped people who didn’t look Thai to arrest them or ask them for money. My family always drove all the way around the checkpoint near our village to get to our house. When I was growing up, Thai government District Officers visited my village and tried to document every family. They wanted to know how many people lived in the village and how many people were stateless – that is how I got a ‘family document’. The document has all of my family members’ names, birthdates and pictures on it. The Thai government then gave us pink identification cards. The pink I.D. cards said that we were stateless, but that we were living in Thailand. With the pink I.D. cards, we were able to travel just in the area of Mae Sai, but we could not pass the next city’s checkpoint without government permission. When my brother, Jack came to Thailand, he had no documents. My mother tried to put him on the family document, but they did not believe that it was my brother. He had to get a white I.D. card, not a pink card like the rest of the family. The pink card has more benefits than the white card. My mother was also afraid to have us leave the house because she thought that our neighbors put poison in our water. One day, one of my sisters went to drink water and the water had stuff floating in it. My mother gave it to the chickens and the chickens died. Two weeks later it happened again. We didn’t trust anybody. I was so little when it happened. She thought that it was because we were stateless people and that there were four kids in our rented house. Probably we were very loud. In the beginning we didn’t feel like we belonged, but even if my family went back to Burma or China, those countries wouldn’t have accepted us either. There is no paperwork for my family anywhere. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260